Appearance In-Itself, Data-Propagation, and External Relationality: Towards a Realist Phenomenology of »Firstness«

Hansen, Mark B.N.

doi:10.28937/1000106454

Appearance In-Itself, Data-Propagation, and External Relationality: Towards a Realist Phenomenology of »Firstness«

Authors :

Abstract

Drawing on American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce›s »phaneroscopy«, and particularly on its point of disjunction from more orthodox phenomenology concerning the status and necessity of reception, this article argues that today’s databases phenomenalize the aesthetic dimension of worldly sensibility. Although database phenomenalizing explicitly substitutes for the phenomenalizing performed by consciousness on standard accounts of phenomenology, the important point is that it does so without severing contact with human experience. What is ultimately at stake here is the status of the phenomenon itself: insofar as it hosts the self-manifestation of the world without necessarily manifesting it to anyone or anything, the phenomenon can be disjoined from its subjective anchoring in consciousness (or any of its avatars) and ascribed to the operationality of worldly sensibility itself.